Music Reviews : Many Notes, Few Ideas From Pianist Viardo

Vladimir Viardo is a pianist who revels in the trappings of virtuosity: the strength, speed, accuracy, extreme dynamics and stamina to conquer every challenge at the keyboard.

At his Ambassador Auditorium debut Sunday afternoon, Viardo--who played a Rachmaninoff concerto at Hollywood Bowl in 1988, and a recital in Costa Mesa in January, 1990--showed again his exceptional achievement, his ability to meet any complex score on its basic terms. At 42, he is a finished and polished artist.

And, it would seem, not a very interesting one.

Viardo’s program on this occasion became a retrospective of post-Romantic, early 20th-Century Russian composers: Medtner, Scriabin, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff--an emotional gamut, as Dorothy Parker once said, from A to B.

This agenda, ending with the strongest work, Rachmaninoff’s “Variations on a Theme by Corelli,” gave the pianist many opportunities for display, many chances to pit his pianissimo against his fortissimo, many complicated passages for his fingers to unravel. What it gave his listeners was an exercise in sameness, the sameness of musical twaddle. So many notes, so much banging, so few ideas . . . .

Two of Scriabin’s vessels of empty but busy virtuosity occupied the central portion of the afternoon. The late Dances, Opus 73 (1914), and the early Third Sonata (1897) share similarities of diction, self-indulgence and excess, while holding the listener only tenuously. After each work ends, one wonders what the point was--empty bombast? self-glorification? the articulation of superficial emotions?

Prokofiev’s colorful “Visions Fugitives” and Medtner’s A-Minor Sonata offer comparable characteristics--the chance to show off, to whisper and storm alternately, to fly about the keyboard manicly one moment, then perch on a muted lyric passage the next; lots of black notes.

In this context, Rachmaninoff’s rich “La Folia” variations seemed like a long-lost masterpiece. And Viardo, ever-resourceful, sometimes brittle of tone, always ready for over-space or understatement, played it with fiendish efficiency.

After that, there were encores: an etude by Medtner, a Mazurka by Chopin, and Franz Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s “Standchen.”